Just a little bit over a week to go now and starting to feel very tired. But I am not willing the festival to be over as usual. I am enjoying the show (though tonight's crowd was a little unresponsive and I maybe lost a proportion of them at the fight section) which is still feeling new and exciting to do. Hard to believe that after tonight there are onbly 8 left to do.
I pottered round the house, not really doing much. I recently bought the Beatles documentary DVD box set. We had watched it on video on our tour bus back in around 1997 and I had enjoyed it then. It reminds me of being on the road with Stew and Kev, Eldon being a massive Beatles fan (we gave him the video box set at the end of the tour). It is fun to watch it again and interesting to see the rise of the group and remember how they essentially started out as a boyband, happy to be manipulated one way and another if it would lead to success. McCartney was especially ambitious, clearly and it is funny watching him trying to defend himself, as well as the fact that all his early anecdotes seem to involve being on a bus (as if this makes him a normal person). I like Paul McCartney very much though, even though he is a bit of a dick at times. It is a shame that he feels overshadowed by the cooler Lennon, because he has achieved enough not to have to be defensive. Yet having been in a double act myself, I can sort of empathise with him.
Anyway, there was a very moving part of the documentary that I had forgotten, where one of the Cavern Beatles fans was being interviewed (at some point where the Beatles were at the height of their fame - I think she was called Cathy) and she was recalling when news came through to the Cavern that the Beatles had achieved their first number one. She said that some of the people there who didn't know the Beatles so well were clapping this news, that the boys in the band couldn't quite believe, but that her and the row of real hardcore fans started crying, as they realised immediately that this meant that the band would no longer be theirs and would be leaving them.
She revealed this information with such sadness and I thought the foresight of those fans was moving and incredible. It said a lot about the nature of fandom, of loving something, wanting it to be yours, something that only a few truly appreciate.
Later I finally got to see Toby Hadoke's show
Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf. I meant to go and see it last year and while it was on tour, but never managed to, so I am glad that Toby has done another run for a week this year, because this is a cracker of a show.
It actually has some parallels with the Beatles fan above. It's a true story of his obsession with the sci-fi series and how it has affected his life. It's not a nerd fest though - there's plenty in there for Dr Who fans, but it works even if you don't really know anything about the show - and is actually much more about Toby, his childhood geekiness, his failure with girls, his absent father and subsequent relationship with his own son.
Toby experiences a similar sorrow when the Dr Who that he loved through the years in the wilderness, when everyone thought it was a joke, suddenly becomes cool. It's his show! How can these other idiots who know so little about it still like it? Though ultimately, in a very moving finale to the show Dr Who brings him and his son together. I am only slightly ashamed to admit that the denouement made me weep, the first show that has done that to me this year. And it was about Dr Who. Except that it wasn't.
It's also a very, very funny show - Toby is a sharp stand-up and there's some lovely gags in there - but it's much more than that. I am not sure what the plans for the future of the show are, but it is on for one more day in Edinburgh, so catch it if you can (though it's on in about three hours so I doubt too many of you will make it).
I also really enjoyed Toby's anger at the commonly held misapprehension that the original Dr Who shows were encumbered with wobbly sets. Having watched the whole canon 80 times, Toby has worked out that the sets only wobbled twice (he of course knows the exact shows) lasting for a total of seven and a half seconds. When you realise how many hours of Dr Who was made this is an insignificant amount of time and not something that the whole programme (and as it happens Jon Pertwee's obituary of the news) should be judged by (especially as he wasn't even in one of the episodes). It is a telling indictment of lazy journalism.
What a rich and wonderful show this is. For all the idiot journalists who also write about how the Fringe is boring and unadventurous and all about comedy, you know that if they actually came and watched some of the shows that are here in tiny caverns and old storage rooms, which are more than about jokes, then they wouldn't be able to make their bland and inaccurate observations, which are made every single year. The cocks.
Ah well. I still think the Edinburgh Fringe is the most amazing arts festival in the world. You should come up and see it.
